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The Missing Link: Galula’s Geopolitics of the Cold War

Sometimes, when immersed in an archive, a historian makes an unexpected discovery. This was the case for me while working at the Yale Sterling Library. In William C. Bullitt’s papers where I had discovered the unpublished manuscript that the American diplomat had co-written with Sigmund Freud on President Woodrow Wilson ¹ , I came across an impressive memorandum by David Galula (1919-1967) addressed to Bullitt ² in 1950. I contacted Jérémy Rubenstein, author of the excellent Terreur et séduction. Une histoire de la doctrine de “guerre révolutionnaire”, (La Découverte, 2022) to introduce it with me, and we publish it here with the accompanying letter from Galula to Bullitt.

These two short documents are the missing links that shed light on the surprising and enigmatic career of a former French soldier and author of two works written in English ³ , but who was little known in France until the war in Iraq ⁴ .

An unusual career

Born on January 10, 1919 in Sfax to a Jewish family with Algerian roots, Galula studied at the Saint-Cyr Military Academy, graduating with the class of 1939-1940 before deciding to join the colonial infantry. Discharged from the army under the Vichy regime’s Jewish statute, he became an intelligence officer in Tangiers, later joining the Allied armies following the landings in North Africa in November 1942. Assigned to General De Lattre’s 1st Army, he stood out in particular during the conquest of Elba in June 1944 ⁵ . He participated in battles in Provence, Alsace, and Germany. He then served under the direct command of Jacques Guillermaz, an expert on China who opened doors to missions in Asia. After two months in Calcutta, he joined the French military mission in China. During this period, he was twice captured by the Communist army, which allowed him to converse with enemy officers and observe their structure. Shortly after, he married an American citizen. In 1949, he was named a UNSCOB ⁶ observer in Greece, where he helped to defeat a communist insurrection. It is from this posting in Thessaloniki that he wrote this memorandum that we are now publishing. Back in Asia, he was assigned to Hong Kong where he observed the conflicts in Indochina, Malaysia, and the Philippines. In 1956, he requested and was granted a field assignment in Algeria, in Kabylia, about five kilometers from Tizi-Ouzou. Starting in November 1956, he began writing “Observations sur la pacification en grande Kabylie” (Observations on Pacification in Greater Kabylia) for General Salan and the High Command in Algeria ⁷ . A month and a half after de Gaulle’s arrival to Matignon on July 22, 1958, Galula was called upon to join de Gaulle’s military staff, more precisely the psychological action and information branch of the National Defense ⁸ . Beginning in 1960, Galula spent more and more time in the United States where, against the backdrop of increasing engagement in Vietnam, there was growing interest in counterinsurgency theories. At the suggestion of General William Westmorland, Galula was recruited as a research associate at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs from March 1962 through November 1963, a period during which he became good friends with Henry Kissinger. In April 1962, he participated in an important four-day symposium hosted by the RAND Corporation in Arlington, Virginia which gathered the best American specialists on counterinsurgency, notably General Lansdale, who Galula had met in the Philippines. It was during this period that he wrote his two landmark works in English. With the end of his contract at Harvard, Galula applied for a position with Mobil Oil, but refused to renounce his French nationality in order to obtain it. In 1963, he returned to France to work for Thomson Houston. In 1965, he published the novel Les Moustaches du Tigre (Flammarion), took a position at NATO in London in 1966, and passed away in Paris on May 11, 1967.

Counterinsurgency

Unlike conventional military operations, which pit armed forces against one another and whose goal is to conquer territory, insurgent warfare seeks to win over a different kind of target: the population ⁹ . Counterinsurgency therefore also has the unique feature of viewing the population as both the main weapon and the objective of the war. This counterinsurgency involves extensive and often brutal social engineering aimed at mobilizing and transforming society so that subversive or revolutionary elements are unable to thrive and become isolated. Emerging in a somewhat empirical way within the armies of the British and French colonial powers as a means of defeating independentist organizations, counterinsurgency was gradually theorized in the 1950s. In order to “hold” the population, it employs a number of techniques: educational, economic, and social development programs, as well as population displacement and concentration, the creation of “loyalist” organizations, the manipulation of militants, propaganda, and a wide range of violent means. The goal is to deploy both allure and terror, with a clear preference for the latter in practice ¹⁰ .

Its motto — “to conquer hearts and minds” — is generally attributed to Gerald Templer (1898-1979), appointed by Churchill in 1952 as British High Commissioner in charge of suppressing the insurrection in Malaya led by the Malayan Communist Party. On the French side, the war in Indochina was a testing ground for officers who developed counterinsurgency theories (paradoxically referred to as “revolutionary war” or “revolutionary war doctrine”). Colonel Charles Lacheroy (1906-2005), stationed in Cochinchina in 1951, can therefore be considered the founding father of the “French School” — as Marie-Monique Robin ¹¹ puts it — to which Galula belongs. Beginning with the Algerian war — and the lesser-known but concurrent war in Cameroon — which established its defining features, counterinsurgency proliferated throughout the world as the preferred method for waging war against communism — with all the ambiguities of that expression and the implications it could carry. It was used as an overarching strategy in some of the most significant operations in Vietnam carried out by the United States, as well as in many other countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa. It was applied either directly by an intervening power or, more often, indirectly by local repressive forces under the guidance of counterinsurgency experts — initially French or British, then American and others. Counterinsurgency relies heavily on psychological warfare, in particular propaganda and manipulation of all kinds. However, this is often accompanied by a high degree of politicization on the part of the soldiers who carry it out, so much so that counterinsurgency is generally held responsible for the many coups d’état that proliferate in its wake. Moreover, it opens the door to numerous war crimes, notably the use of torture and forced displacement of populations. To say that it received bad press — when it was not carefully erased from memory — before being resurrected during the Iraq war, would be an understatement.

This revival came about due to a little-known French author: David Galula. Driven by General David Petraeus (b. 1952), head of the U.S. armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and later Director of the CIA, Galula became the “Clausewitz of counterinsurgency” in the 2000s ¹² and was the subject of several books and biographical articles. Above all, Petraeus made him the primary point of reference for the new U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine set out in the manual he oversaw ¹³ .

Among the proponents of psychological warfare, Galula is quite pragmatic, in keeping with Lyautey, who said “there is no one method… there are ten, there are twenty; or rather, there is one method, which is called flexibility, elasticity, and suitability to places, times and circumstances ¹⁴ ”. In this way, Galula advocates a kind of “strategic syncretism ¹⁵ ”. Nevertheless, he emphasizes the capacity for framing, protection or coercion. In other words, for Galula, measures to promote economic development and social well-being, in conjunction with powerful propaganda, can only be effective when the population is already convinced that it is on the side of the strongest — or future winner — of the opposing sides. Consequently, he advocates a strong initial military deployment to control — if not terrorize — the population, after which subversive elements can be hunted down with the population’s more or less tacit agreement. Propaganda and the rallying of the population, based on a proposal that is relatively indifferent or can be adapted as required, only materialize after this phase of asserting power, according to his 1964 manual. 

Galula is now well-known as a seminal author in the field of counterinsurgency, but his geostrategic thinking has remained largely unknown. The unpublished essay we are publishing today, dated January 1950, reveals a surprising acuity in this field. Furthermore, the recipient of this document, William Bullitt, allows us to better understand the guiding force of a very distinctive career path. Indeed, between his various observation posts and fields of action, Galula forged a network of contacts in France and the United States that further accentuate his singularity among French officers of his generation. This remarkable career unfolded against the background of both the struggle for independence and the rise of communism, which he witnessed up close through his observation of the civil wars in China and Greece, as well as his participation in the French colonial war in Algeria.

A decisive meeting with William Bullitt?

Where does Galula’s interest in psychological warfare come from? There is clearly a generational effect, stemming from the Second World War and the various influences — German, British and American — in this field on French army officers. More to the point, perhaps William Bullitt was no stranger to this phenomenon. After all, this former U.S. ambassador to Moscow (1933-1936) and Paris (1936 and 1940) joined De Gaulle in Algiers in May 1944. De Gaulle then posted him to General de Lattre’s 1st Army headquarters. There, Bullitt created and directed a psychological warfare division ¹⁶ . During the campaign that took the 1st Army from Toulon to Frankfurt, Galula met Bullitt, whose activities intrigued the young officer.

After 1945, Bullitt kept in touch with De Lattre, a general who was particularly aware of the use of images and propaganda, for whom “things are not what they are, but what we make them seem” ¹⁷ . In 1946, he published The Great Globe Itself: A Preface to World Affairs ¹⁸ , whose French translation, read and approved by De Lattre, appeared in 1948 under the title Le Destin du monde (Self Editions). For Bullitt, the main problem posed by the Second World War was that the democratic nations — the United States, Great Britain and France — had to ally themselves with a totalitarian Communist state in order to bring down a totalitarian Fascist state. This alliance failed to temper the USSR’s ambitions, which, being inherently hostile towards democracy, dreamed only of global conquest. America entered the war to prevent Germany from dominating Europe and Japan from dominating China. Once the war was over, both Europe and China were in danger of falling under Soviet control.

Bullitt became the spokesman for, and one of the organizers of, a network of political and military leaders dedicated to the anti-communist struggle. As early as 1947, De Lattre encouraged Bullitt to go to Indochina, which he anticipated would become one of the Cold War’s new front lines. After a few weeks there, Bullitt concluded that the rallying of “millions of Annamites” to Ho Chi Minh had less to do with the appeal of communism than with their fight for national independence. To ensure that “Stalin’s yoke does not replace France’s”, Bullitt advised France to cooperate with Vietnamese nationalists, suggesting that U.S. aid would be part of this alliance. Fully committed to this nationalist path, Bullitt travelled to Hong Kong to meet the former emperor Bao-Daï, whom he hoped would head the next Vietnamese state. Bullitt then returned to France in October 1947 to make the case for the “Bao-Dai solution” to his friend, President Vincent Auriol. He dangled the promise of help from Washington if Paris could drive a wedge between the Viet Minh and the nationalists. Like Bao-Daï, the French wrongly believed that Bullitt was representing the official U.S. position. Bullitt, however, was less the official voice of his government than the focal point of a network that sought to influence the decisions of the American and French governments. In his dealings with Auriol, he was less an envoy from Washington than the emissary of French personalities, including General de Lattre, who were trying to make their views on Indochina prevail.

In December 1950, De Lattre was finally appointed both Army Commander and High Commissioner to Indochina. From this position of both civilian and military power, he implemented a strategy featuring an arsenal of psychological warfare that was rapidly modernized under his guidance. In particular, most battalions were now equipped with a photographer, enabling the French army’s propaganda department to produce — and control — all images of the Indochina war that appeared on magazine covers in the West. During his visit to the United States in September 1951, De Lattre was again able to count on Bullitt’s help in lobbying the American administration for arms aid. General De Lattre’s time in the United States is a good illustration of the operation to transform the French colonial war into a front in the worldwide war against communism. He argued that “the war in Indochina is not a colonial war, it’s a war against red colonialism. As in Korea, it is a war against Communist dictatorship ¹⁹ ”, which partially convinced American authorities. 

Once any anti-colonial uprising was deemed to have been initiated by Moscow, counterinsurgency methods came to be viewed as the ideal means of waging war against Soviet power and its expansion around the world. Counterinsurgency was therefore quickly promoted as an alternative to outright war, especially nuclear war.

For Bullitt, however, it was only a matter of time before Communist cells, planted in overly tolerant democracies, went on the offensive. Sooner or later, they would attack. With this in mind, it was essential to be ready to confront them. To this end, his thinking turned to a guerrilla strategy, which was supported by a network of military strategists and politicians in the United States and around the world. Among the French members of this informal network was General Guillain de Bénouville, whom Bullitt had met in Algiers in 1943. Bénouville was responsible for foreign affairs and defense within the RPF, the political party founded by de Gaulle in 1947. In mid-1948, after a meeting with Bullitt, he wrote a forty-page report on prevention and response capability in the face of Soviet aggression, entitled “L’Europe doit être défendue” (“Europe must be defended”). General de Bénouville wrote to Bullitt: “Few of us are familiar with the new form of combat which, if war were to take place, would be imposed on us by Russian strategy, by which I mean the revolutionary strategy of internal aggression combined with the normal strategy of airborne armies ²⁰ ”. Bénouville proposed a network of internal fighters modeled on resistance networks, with large motorized and armored military forces, supported by self-defense organizations ²¹ . “If such an organization had existed even in an embryonic form, Russia would never have been able to pull off the Prague coup,” he argues. He also advocated the immediate creation of these structures, which would be ready for counter-revolutionary warfare ²² .

And so, a network took shape, a group of individuals representing the intersection of the civilian and military worlds, made up of officers, diplomats, academics, and journalists. This group thought through a geostrategy that combined the global confrontation against Soviet communism with local conflicts focused on revolutionary warfare. The document we are publishing shows one of these individuals in action — revealing his rare insight. There is little doubt that after reading it, Bullitt, who was at the heart of this network, would have shared, if not the text, then at least its content with many of its members, both in France — notably Bénouville and De Lattre — and in the United States. Among the network’s influential figures was Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who, in the name of the fight against communism, financed Bullitt’s trips to Indochina and China. It also included political leaders such as James Forrestal, Secretary of Defense under Truman (1948-1949), and Robert A. Lovett, Assistant Secretary, as well as high-ranking officers who considered the policies of Truman and then Eisenhower to be too “soft ²³ ”. It was this informal yet powerful network that Galula gained access to through Bullitt. The quality of his analysis surely opened the door to a wider community of American defense specialists, united by the Cold War.

A prescient geostrategic vision imbued with psychological warfare

In January 1950, three months after the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China and a few weeks before the Sino-Soviet Mutual Assistance Pact — which included military clauses — was signed on February 14, 1950, Galula seemed to detect a Russian attitude that would eventually alienate the Chinese leadership (p.4). This geostrategic analysis is surprisingly prescient for a foreign observer whose stay in Peking predated the Chinese Communist Party’s seizure of power (1945-1949).

Just a few weeks after the Communist victory in China, and the signing of a Sino-Soviet pact that was far from an empty gesture, with very concrete actions beginning as early as that summer, both in Korea — where the war began on June 25^th — and with the Vietminh who were at war with France in Indochina, it was quite audacious, to say the least, to diagnose a misunderstanding between the two Communist powers. Four years later, when Galula had the opportunity to revisit his analysis, his former mentor and French military superior Jacques Guillermaz (1911-1998), a renowned China expert, was sceptical of his disciple’s conclusions:

“I think it’s a bit reckless to conclude, as you did, on the basis of a single sentence, that there will be serious disputes between Moscow and Beijing. I believe, as do you, that the Chinese will increasingly seek to assert themselves, to gain advantages from their alliance. But by presenting things the way you have, the prospect of tensions will inevitably lead those who take their desires for reality to jump to your conclusions, extrapolating them further than you ever intended ²⁴ .” 

It’s likely that when Galula joined Harvard in 1962 and met Henry Kissinger, his analysis found a sympathetic ear. The two men became friends, socialized together, and talked of nothing but politics and international relations. They were “kindred spirits in terms of their vision of how American foreign policy should be conducted”, according to Ruth Galula ²⁵ . The Kissinger and Galula couples regularly dined together, and one of the Kissinger sons became a playmate of Galula’s son. Just a few weeks before his death in 1967, the visionary nature of Galula’s assessment was recognized by the American academic and journalist Doak Barnett (1921-1999), who wrote to him:

“I also remember that you were one of the few people convinced that there were significant tensions and problems beneath the surface within [China’s] military establishment as well as in other sectors of the political system. Subsequent developments have certainly confirmed your judgments at the time, as I recall ²⁶ .” 

Doak Barnett reminds Galula, whom he met in Hong Kong in 1952 when both were working for their respective embassies ²⁷ , of his prescient analysis of the Chinese-Soviet split. Barnett was to play a key role as Nixon’s advisor, in the United States’ rapprochement with China.

Means of action that fail

In order to “drive a wedge between China and Russia” (p.3), to “prevent China from fighting in the Soviet bloc when, in a few years’ time, the Cold War will have turned into open warfare” (p.1), in the face of the mortal danger of a Soviet bloc which, with China, would extend to the whole of Asia, Galula presents not only an analysis of the situation but also the means to bring down or weaken the enemy. He essentially advocates an economic blockade because, he believes, the Western coalition is in a position to carry it out, but above all because he sees in it a means of “irritating the Chinese people” (p.5) primarily “against the Russian allies who will not help them during this crisis”. It was a psychological warfare tactic that would probably have failed, reinforcing hostility to the West in China.

In his brilliant note and the letter that accompanies it, it is Galula’s geopolitical analysis that is prescient — it was the deep-seated forces of nationalism and patriotism that would lead Communist China to break away from the Soviet Union. In the end, Galula was as much a strategic thinker as a military passeur (intermediary).

1. The Madman in the White House. Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard University Press, 2023).
2. Captain D. Galula, Salonika, January 26, 1950. Letter from David Galula to William Bullitt, April 28, 1950, William C. Bullitt Papers, Collection no. 112, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library (hereafter Bullitt Papers), Box 31, folder 693.
3. Pacification in Algeria, 1956–1958. RAND Corporation, 1963 ; Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. Wesport, Connecticut: Praeger Security International, 1964.
4. Cf. Ann Marlowe, “David Galula: his life and intellectual context, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 2010
5. For this monographic paragraph cf. Élie Tenenbaum, “David Galula et la contre-insurrection, penseur militaire ou passeur stratégique?”, Jean Baechler ed, Penseurs de la stratégie. Hermann, 2014, pg. 239-253
6. For United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans. This committee was created by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947. 
7. Published in Contacts, April 1967.
8. Emmanuel Blanchard and Neil MacMaster, “David Galula and Maurice Papon: A watershed in COIN strategy in de Gaulle ’ s Paris”, in Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies, Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless Ed., Bloomberry, London, 2017, pp. 213-228. Tenenbaum, 245-248.
9. Edouard Joly, Du terrorisme à la guerre civile ? Notes sur David Galula et sa pensée de la contre-insurrection, in Le Philosophoire, 2017/2 (N°48) p. 194.
10. See Jérémy Rubenstein, idem.
11. Marie-Monique Robin, Escadrons de la mort, l’école française, La Découverte, 2004.
12. The expression was initially coined, ironically or self-deprecatingly, by Galula himself, see A. A. Cohen, “Galula: the life and writings of the French officer who defined the art of counterinsurgency”, Praeger, 2012. It is repeated by David Petraeus without the slightest hint of irony.
13. Field Manual No. 3-24, December 15, 2006.
14. Hubert Lyautey, Lettres du Tonkin et de Madagascar, Armand Colin, 1921, 2nd ed., p. 467.
15. Elie Tenenbaum, art. cit.
16. William Bullitt to John Wiley, Oct. 28, 1945, Bullitt Papers, Box 90, folder 2307.
17.  Michel Frois, La révélation de Casablanca. Mémoires d’un officier de cavalerie atteint par le virus de la communication, Atlantica, 1999, p.63.
18. New-York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946. 
19.  «Le général de Lattre demanderait à Washington une priorité ” parallèle ” en ce qui concerne les livraisons d’armes à la Corée et à l’Indochine», Le Monde, September 15, 1951.
20. Bénouville to Bullitt, July 14, 1948, Bullitt Papers box 24, folder 523.
21. Guillain de Bénouville ‘L’Europe doit être défendue’, July 1948, Bullitt Papers box 24, folder 523 pg. 27-28. 
22. Bénouville to Bullitt, July 14, 1948, Bullitt Papers box 24, folder 523.
23. Cf. Weil, op. cit., pp.310-320.
24. Letter from Guillermaz to Galula, March 21, 1954, quoted by A. A. Cohen, op.cit.
25. A. A. Cohen, op.cit.
26.  Letter from D. Barnett to Galula, April 20, 1967, quoted in ibid.
27. Martin Weil, “Scholar A. Doak Barnett Dies”, The Washington Post, March 20, 1999.